Feet dragging she turned and made for home.
Lucy, at sight of her, threw up distracted hands, her first pleased greeting dying on her lips. ‘Oh, my goodness gracious me, Miss Jess! What HAVE you been doing? You’re filthy! And – your dress – you’ve torn the hem—’
‘I’ll mend it, I promise. Don’t fuss, Lucy, there’s a dear.’ She unloaded her pocketful of chestnuts onto the table. ‘Hide these, and we can roast them tomorrow, while the dragon’s out. She isn’t back yet, is she?’
Lucy shook her head, still speechless at the sight of the wreckage of her young mistress’ clothes.
‘There, you see? I told you I’d be back in time. Now – quickly – help me change, then lock me back in again. She’ll never know the difference. All my beastly clothes look the same anyway.’ She leaned forward, whispering conspiratorially. ‘Bran’s safe. I won’t tell you where, but he’s safe.’
‘No one knows you’ve been out?’ The girl’s voice was anxious.
‘No one that matters. Now – hurry. Let’s get rid of these clothes—’
It was fifteen minutes later, and a cleaned, tidied and brushed Jessica was decorously seated at her small bedroom desk reading the tract that MacKenzie had set her to study that morning when she heard a distant commotion. She lifted her head, listening. Someone shouted, a voice not quite under control. A door slammed. Voices were raised, then quieted. Unease permeated the air. Jessica frowned and went to the window. The front court was empty, the door closed. Within the house, however, the inexplicable disturbance continued. Her heart lurched a little, sickly. Had her escapade been discovered, and so soon? And – if it had – would it cause such an uproar?
She ran to the door. ‘Lucy? Lucy, what’s that? What’s happening?’
‘I don’t know, Miss Jess—’
Jessica heard the nursery door open and shut. She banged urgently upon the pannelled bedroom door. ‘Lucy!’
The door swung open, revealing not Lucy, but MacKenzie – a MacKenzie frighteningly white-faced and all but unrecognizable. ‘Miss Jessica—’
Jessica stared at her. No denying it, here was disaster, written in distress and concern on a face not normally used to revealing either. Panic lifted, drying her mouth. Bran was dead – Giles had found him after all – ‘What is it? What’s all that noise?’
‘Come – sit down—’
She swallowed the lump that seemed to be growing in her throat, blocking her breath, shook her head. ‘Tell me.’
MacKenzie glanced at Lucy, as if for support, but the plump, puzzled face offered no help. Unaccustomed and awkward she took the child’s hand. ‘There’s been an accident,’ she said. ‘Your brother’s dead.’
For a moment the words refused to register. Dead? What was the woman talking about? Who was dead? Who could possibly be dead on such a glorious, such an ordinary, day? Dead? Jessica stared at her like a half-wit child.
‘Come, child. Sit down.’
She allowed herself to be led to a chair, sat awkwardly, like a strung doll in the hands of an incompetent puppeteer.
‘The punt – they went too close to the weir – it went over—’ MacKenzie was speaking jerkily, her voice seeming to Jessica to be small and reedy, as if coming from an impossible distance. ‘Mr Giles tried to save him – you know Mr Edward was no great swimmer—’
That jolted her to agonized life. She leapt up. ‘Edward? Edward’s dead? No! There’s a mistake – I don’t believe it – I saw him – just a little while ago – he was laughing—’ she crammed her hand to her mouth, stopping the words, and stared white-faced.
Lucy had made a strange, small sound, like an animal whimpering, at MacKenzie’s words. Now she lifted her apron to her face, sobbing, the sound loud in the terrible silence.
Jessica backed away from MacKenzie, shaking her head determinedly. ‘No! No!’ and before anyone could stop her she had darted past them through the door and was flying down the stairs as she had earlier in the day with scant regard for life or limb. This time, eyes blinded with half-formed tears, instead of escaping through the outer door she turned into the long, windowed gallery that would take her to the first floor of the main wing. In the corridor that led to the top of the central staircase she met a maidservant, crying noisily, her face blotchy. From downstairs came the sound of voices. Impelled by shock and terror she ran, almost tumbling around the curve of the wide, sweeping formal staircase.
The library door stood open. Through it she could see Giles, wet and bedraggled, a bloody gash on his blanched, dirty face, wrapped in a blanket and shivering upon the edge of the sofa. His face was agonized. ‘I tried – Mother, I swear I tried! He panicked. I couldn’t hold him – he’d have drowned both of us—’
Jessica skidded to a halt. From within the room came the most awful sound she had ever heard; a wordless cry of grief, no less harrowing for being stifled almost to silence before it had begun. Then, ‘Edward!’ Jessica heard her mother cry softly, the voice that was usually so coolly modulated ragged with savage and intolerable pain, ‘Edward!’
And, hearing it, the child knew then that the unthinkable must, after all, be true; and the world changed as she stood there.
* * *
Jessica’s twelfth birthday dawned unmarked; grey, chill and building for rain. The day of Edward Hawthorne’s funeral, appropriately, would see the breaking of the glorious autumn weather. The whole countryside turned out, the gentry in the blacks and greys and purples of mourning, the countryfolk bareheaded in the cold wind; the Hawthorne heir had been a fine young man, and popular. The mournful procession, headed by the splendid carriage that carried Edward’s ornate coffin, wound its way at solemn walking pace through the park, out onto the road and down into the village and to the church, the black plumes on the horses’ heads nodding and tossing with a kind of macabre gaiety in the wind.
Jessica sat, still almost entirely numbed with shock, beside MacKenzie and opposite her brother John in the last in the line of family carriages. In the first of those carriages Maria Hawthorne sat, rigid and fragile as glass, her veil lifted to reveal a face chalk white and pared to the bone with grief, her dry eyes fixed unblinking upon the splendid box that held the mortal remains of her firstborn and favourite child. She had not shed a tear; indeed, since the outcry that Jessica had heard she had hardly spoken. That Edward had always been Maria’s best-loved child had never been in question – her other children had always accepted that with neither surprise nor any great envy – who could help but love blithe and gentle Edward above them all? No one would have expected the bereaved mother to have taken this tragedy any way but badly: but to Jessica the sight of her mother’s controlled face, the lovely line of bone stark and pale, the great forget-me-not eyes utterly dry and tearless, the mouth firm as always, had been the worst element in an all but unbearable few days.
The long, silent procession came at last to its destination. Jessica stumbled from the carriage and was thankful to find her small cold hand tucked firmly into John’s large warm one. He half-smiled down at her, encouragingly, his eyes sad but crinkling with concerned affection. John, like the others, was very likely to forget her existence for most of the time, but at least when he remembered her he was kind. She huddled close to him as they fell into line and followed the coffin as it was carried shoulder high to its resting place. Amongst the group of people who waited already by the grave to pay their last respects she saw Robert, his parents and his sister. Robert’s face was sympathetic as he caught her eye. Beside him Clara was handsome as ever in mourning black, her rather sharp features limned clear and austere in the dull light, her face still, and oddly expressionless. Watching her, Jessica remembered suddenly that just a couple of years ago, before Cambridge and before the arranged Felworth alliance, there had been some sly talk of Edward and Clara – two young people growing up together and apparently much taken with one another. Yet Clara stood like stone, tearless and composed. She surely must be feeling something?
The
service had begun. Jessica averted her eyes from the coffin, closed her ears to the fearful words. She could not bear the thought of what lay within that box, nor what might now happen to it. Edward, yet not Edward, all life, all laughter, all loving fled, buried in the darkness of earth and the crawling, eating things it held. She flinched from the raw gash in the ground that waited to take the coffin. Deliberately detaching herself from the unbearable proceedings she fell to studying the faces about her. MacKenzie, morbidly dour, eyes properly downcast, mouth pinched like an ill-sewn seam. Lucy, plump and good-natured, openly tear-stained. John, his quiet face softly sad, mouth set in a straight, unhappy line. Caroline, distraught, her pretty face swollen and reddened by the tears she had been shedding non-stop for days. Father – tall, narrow-faced, his red-gold hair greying a little at temple and nape but still handsome, still vigorous and the physical mirror-image of the son he now buried. Giles beside him, still-faced, the vivid life of him for the moment dimmed, the brightly handsome lines of his face drawn fine with grief and sorrow.
And yet for all his grief he lived, and Edward did not.
Shockingly, all the hostility that Giles invariably aroused in Jessica’s childish breast rose, suddenly, bitterly and frighteningly forceful. Why Edward and not you? she found herself thinking. Why did he die? Why not you?
The words had been spoken, the hymns sung, Robert’s voice lifting clear and heartbreakingly sweet above all. The coffin had been lowered and lay now upon its last earthly bed. William Hawthorne, face set in sorrow, dropped a handful of earth upon the remains of his son and heir and stepped back. Then Maria stepped forward, in her hand a single flower, a white rose from the gardens of New Hall. At the graveside she stood for a moment, and the lovely flower was not paler than her face. She opened her black-gloved fingers. The long-stemmed rose clung for a moment, as if reluctant to fall. Then it dropped and she stepped back. Giles stepped to her side, reaching a hand to her elbow, the eldest son now, strong and ready to serve, solicitous for her welfare. Slowly she turned her head to him.
Giles’ hand dropped from his mother’s arm. Composedly she turned from him, lifted her hands and drew the concealing veil over her face.
And only Jessica, her own bitterness still within her, had seen, as Giles had seen, the venom of that same question in those flower-blue eyes. Why him, and not you? How are you here, when he is dead? Why did you not save him, or die with him?
With a sound as final as death itself the first spadeful of earth fell upon young Edward Hawthorne’s coffin.
Chapter Two
Edward’s death, inevitably, affected them all, well-loved as he had been and the king-pin of his parents’ ambitions. For months Jessica found herself looking for him still, listening for the sound of his voice, the chime of his frequent laughter. The loss of her brother cast a pall upon a winter that was in any case cold and hard. The bad weather arrived like a wolf with the new year of 1811 and kept its savage grip upon the snowbound East Anglian countryside for weeks. Abroad, despite Wellington’s rapturously greeted success in Portugal, Napoleon’s stranglehold upon Europe showed no real signs of weakening, whilst in a Britain isolated both economically and militarily from a virtually enslaved Europe an unstable king slipped finally and hopelessly into insanity while his foppish son devoted his time to an outrageous architectural toy in Brighton and his subjects, their jobs and livings threatened by the new machines that inventive and enterprising men saw as fortune-makers, muttered angrily and prepared for a war of their own.
Christmas at New Hall, with Edward never far from mind, was a more subdued affair than usual; for Jessica its high spot was the day that she spent with a now fully-recovered Robert and his family at Old Hall. She and Robert had together collected the holly boughs that made the old house festive, and had helped Mrs Williams to mix the plum puddings and the rich mincemeat for the pies. Amidst the gifts and the laughter, the traditional games in which the whole household joined, Mrs Williams’ splendid food and the pleasure of good company she once or twice found herself altogether forgetting her sadness – a fact that brought guilt flooding when she returned to the grandeur of New Hall and to the pale, strained beauty of her mother’s face. For Maria Hawthorne was inconsolable still. Not that she made great show of her grief, on the contrary, calm and composed as ever she rarely spoke of it. But it would not be eased. Edward had been her favourite, her firstborn, her darling boy and nothing and no one could make up for his loss. Her attitude to Giles, with whom she had never had a particularly strong bond despite their physical resemblance, and who had now, willy-nilly, stepped into his dead brother’s shoes was distant. Surprisingly, however, Giles took no offence and showed no resentment at her cool treatment of him. Indeed he demonstrated a grace and patience far beyond any that Jessica had ever suspected he might possess. Mildly and with understanding he appeared to accept his mother’s disinterest and occasional criticism and with a forebearance that seemed to his younger sister completely at odds with his character he patiently waited for Maria’s grief and unhappiness to temper. More than once, however, in the stables Jessica came upon evidence that whatever his outward reaction to his mother’s ill-concealed antipathy Giles’ newly-discovered sweet temper was only skin deep; for after his morning ride poor Belle more often than not would stand, exhausted and whipped to a lather, her stable lad muttering mutinously at the ill-treatment of the beast. That Giles could so take out his frustrations upon a dumb animal did little to endear him to Jessica.
With his father, however, the new heir to fortune did rather better. No one in fact could deny that in the management of the land Giles was far more adept – and interested – than indolent, happy-go-lucky Edward had ever been. William Hawthorne was a busy man, and his first interest always was the management of money. The acquisition of New Hall and its acres had been in the first place a matter of status, of recognition and respectability. However, businessman that he was he did not like to see any asset go to waste, and Giles’ enthusiasm and practical grasp of the affairs of the land pleased him immensely. Giles took to the management of New Hall’s estates like a duck to water. Where his brother had been happy to let things lie within months he was suggesting and implementing innovations designed to make the place both more efficient and more profitable. Land was enclosed and drained, new crop rotation systems devised. Small, uneconomic tenant farms were taken over and amalgamated with larger more productive holdings; and if families were turned from home and hearth and onto the roads and the not too tender care of the parish, it was all done with nicely expressed regret and in the name of efficiency and profit. Edward, despite his father’s best efforts, had never been truly interested in anything beyond the good horseflesh with which New Hall could provide him: Giles, it now swiftly became apparent, knew enough already of the workings of the land and its tenants to make an efficient and demanding manager. He was able and energetic and had revealed in a very short space of time after his brother’s death something that almost amounted to a passion for the land and possessions of New Hall. Yet still his mother’s attitude remained the same – Edward was gone, and woe betide the one, however able, who thought in any way to replace him.
For Jessica those first, wintry weeks after Christmas dragged upon leaden feet. Whenever she could she escaped MacKenzie’s dour supervision and ran in the snow-bound fields and woods with Bran. At least out of the debacle of Edward’s death had come Bran’s survival – wheedled from a still-shaken and preoccupied Giles by Jessica – and for that she could not help but be happy. But with Robert back at school she was lonely, and the weeks and months that stretched ahead to spring and to Robert’s return promised to be empty indeed. Alone she roamed the woodlands, slid upon the frozen lake, rode her pony across the glittering winter ice-fields.
It was on a day late in February, with a red sun glinting fire from the ice-strung branches of the trees that she saw Clara FitzBolton riding, apparently aimlessly, in the deep woodlands to the west of the lake. Elegant as an elf-qu
een in her full-skirted brown velvet riding habit, the rakishly mannish cut of the jacket emphasizing the firm curve of her breasts and the slim, arrow-straight line of her back Clara rode, sidesaddle, easily and well, her narrow hands in their leather gloves firm upon the reins, her head poised, glossy dark hair coiled beneath her tall-crowned hat. A hand softly upon Bran’s shaggy muzzle Jessica watched from the shelter of a fallen oak as the girl’s mare picked her delicate way along the frozen track. If Clara had not noticed them Jessica saw no reason to startle her with their presence – the more so since, officially, they had no business being there in the first place and Robert’s sister was not the kind of person to ignore such small details. She waited until Clara had disappeared down the track before setting off in the opposite direction around the frosted lakeside; but moments later the sound of another horse stilled her movements and brought her head up sharply. Bran’s tail swished, dangerously delighted. Jessica grabbed him and held on. In the distance, flickering through the trees like a shadow in the red winter sunlight, was Giles, riding Belle.
‘Be still!’ she whispered, fiercely, to Bran: always she kept the dog as far from Giles as was possible, knowing how swiftly her brother’s temper could be aroused, and aware too that his power since Edward’s death had increased considerably. Now there would be no voice to prevent him from having a worthless mongrel knocked on the head if the fancy took him – ‘Ssh!’
The Hawthorne Heritage Page 4
